by Kate Elliott
“I hate to mention this, but I’m terribly thirsty.”
“I only paid for passage. Have you any funds at all, Cat?”
“Do you think I wouldn’t offer to pay my own way if I could?”
“I wish you would stop that. A simple ‘No’ would suffice.”
I thought it wiser to say nothing, so I clambered into the canoe and arranged my bundle to cushion my backside. He sat in front, his back to me. The men paddled with long blades that cut the water. I clutched the gunnels, too paralyzed at being surrounded by water to worry about thirst.
It was not such a long distance, no more than an hour or three, but my life crawled past my eyes at a creeping baby’s pace and then limped back as an aged crone before we came around a headland. There, spread before us, lay the infamous city of Expedition.
Buildings stretched along a jetty that ran for at least a mile along the shore. At a river’s mouth, the embankment broke into a harbor where masted ships clustered. Proper city walls rose down by the harbor. Where the river opened onto the sea lay a flat island ringed by six skeletal towers like the points of a prince’s coronet, stately airships moored to two of them. On the eastern side of the river, a pall of drifting smoke darkened the morning sky, streaming in billows into the west on a stout wind. Smokestacks grew like shafts of blackened grain. The distant clatter of engine works and busy machines hammered a faint counterpoint to the wind’s bluster and the slap of swells against the canoe’s hull as we parted the waters.
Founded by refugees from the Empire of Mali and their Phoenician shipmasters and allies, the population had swelled with the ranks of criminals, indentured servants, unscrupulous merchants, fortune hunters, and the discontented and maladjusted flotsam and jetsam borne across the ocean from Europa and Africa. More recently, so history told, trolls had emigrated south from their homeland to make common cause with like-minded rats, as Chartji would call them. I wondered if there might be an office of Godwik and Clutch I could approach for aid in securing passage back to Adurnam and Bee once I had accomplished my task.
We passed slim canoes and chubby sailboats, men out fishing who waved to us in a friendly manner that our boatmen returned. We skimmed not toward the river’s mouth and the big wharves where the oceangoing ships lay to harbor but toward a crowded comb of piers farther west. Boats crammed the shore.
I pressed a hand to my breast, feeling the locket’s warmth like a promise that I would soon find a safe haven. Caught by an inexplicably sharp thrill, I leaned forward. The jetty spread before me in all its magnificently confounding bustle, folk hauling and carrying and bargaining and loitering and tossing out line and drawing in skiffs. The life and light of the place seemed about to break over me like the tide of a dragon’s dream.
We bumped up against a pier. The steersman offered a gap-toothed leer as I scrambled out with my bundle and my cane. My bare feet slipped on fish guts and less savory spume. I gritted my teeth and plowed on.
“Come along, Cat,” said Drake over his shoulder as he strode down the long wooden pier.
Men working on or lounging in canoes and skiffs looked up as he passed, expressions incurious or passively hostile; then they would see me, and a wolfish kind of grin would flash as they took a good look along me from my head to my toes. My pagne had plastered itself down the length of my thighs. I regretted leaving my jacket unbuttoned, because my shift and bodice were still damp enough to cling. I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Fished a river siren out of the water, did yee?” called one young man to the men in the canoe. “Look at that hair!”
Men within earshot all agreed, quite vocally and with a great deal of amusement, about my cursed hair. I could not imagine why I had not braided it back.
I had no trouble keeping track of Drake in the press of bodies, for his red-gold shock of hair stood out like fire. Men stepped out of his way, not making a scene of it, but it was clear Drake need not ask for passage. They knew what he was. And he was glad they knew.
We stepped onto a vastly wide, stone-paved avenue slimed with a thin layer of mud and oil churned by sun and yesterday’s rain and the constant trammeling of the exceptional amount of traffic coming and going. A high-wheeled cart driven by a bored-looking man and drawn by a hairy but quite small mammoth—if that was not a contradiction in terms—trundled past as I stared gape-mouthed. A four-winged bird feathered in bright colors reminiscent of a troll’s crest glided overhead, a white tube clutched in its fore-talons. Four soldiers casually carrying rifles over their shoulders strolled along the jetty, now and again pausing to speak to young men as if recruiting.
Two men uniformed in red tabards hurried along the avenue, each carrying a long staff and wearing a stiff black cap. Drake dropped at once into a crouch, head bent to conceal his face. He fiddled with his sandals as if he had caught a pebble until the men walked out of sight past a company of women who were striding along with laden baskets on their heads.
“Come along, Cat.” He rose and began walking east, in their wake, toward the distant city walls.
I caught his wrist and pulled him to a stop.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a wide dusty open work area set off behind a low fence and rimmed with long thatch-roofed shelters with no walls. Men worked at beams and planks. In truth what had drawn my eye was the rear view of a young man stripped to the waist and plying an adze along a beam. I could not help but admire his muscled back.
“That’s a carpentry yard. Strange you should need to ask, as they have the like in Adurnam.”
He tugged, but I held my ground.
His gaze narrowed. “Didn’t you see the two wardens? They can arrest me. I’m taking you to the Speckled Iguana. You’ll stay there in hiding until I sort out if the general is back in the city.”
I ripped my gaze away from the carpenter’s decorative back and stared at Drake as if he had sprouted two heads. “You’re abandoning me here?”
“I’m not abandoning you, Cat. You’ll lie low in a safe place. I’ll pay your room and board, and the innkeeper will watch over you. He’s a partisan, an old soldier and countryman. An Iberian.” He sighed, as if exhausted by having to explain things to a persistently dim-witted child. “I need you to keep your mouth shut and your head down until I return. As soon as I know what the situation is here, we’ll sort things out.”
“How long until that happens? What will I do?”
He shook his arm with an angry grimace, and I let go. “The longer I stand here in public view, the more likely it is I’ll be spotted. Then I’ll be arrested. Is that what you want?”
“Why should I want that?”
“A question I couldn’t possibly answer.” As if to punctuate his words, a clock tolled down the hour: ten in the morning. Some distance down the jetty, at an intersection of a major side street, stood a squat building topped by a clock tower. A parade of little clockwork children passed beneath the clock’s face.
“Blessed Tanit,” I whispered, for the clock’s workings had finally shaken loose the obvious. “What if I’m pregnant?”
Most inappropriately, he kissed me on the lips. “Don’t you know why we fire mages are so sought after as lovers?”
“Why would I know that?”
His fingers tightened painfully over mine. “Cat, I fear no man has ever told you that repeated impertinence in a woman makes her ugly. Take care you do not lose your pretty face. Or perhaps you have complaints beyond those whose linen you have already aired.”
The comment so reminded me of the head of the poet Bran Cof that I would have laughed, except I had seen James Drake engulf three men’s bodies in flames.
I twisted my hand out of his grip. “I am sure,” I said in my blandest tone, “that fire mages are sought after as lovers for their own special qualities.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. But you’ll be glad to hear we are indifferently fertile. So the chances my seed will plant in you is small.”
I pressed a hand to my belly, sei
zed with a horrible foreboding.
“Or are you disappointed? I know women dream of becoming pregnant—”
“I was dreaming about having a bowl of yam pudding!”
“You’re very amusing, Cat, when you make your little jokes.” He flagged down a man who was pulling along a cart with a canvas awning draped over a seat wide enough for two people. “We’ve loitered too long. I must get out of sight immediately. Wardens patrol thickly through these districts where most of the trouble comes from.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Go to the Speckled Iguana.” He kissed me again on the lips and clambered onto the seat. “Ask for the innkeeper and tell him the usual phrase: A rising light marks the dawn of a new world. You can trust him.”
He spoke a meaningless phrase to the cart-man, who was wiping sweat from his forehead with a cloth. The man stowed his cloth, gripped the shafts, and off they jolted, leaving me all alone in the midst of an unfamiliar city.
19
I stood stunned and bewildered, surrounded by tramping feet, axes chopping, wheels turning and a man whistling a cheerful tune. People, carts, wheelbarrows, wagons, laden donkeys, and pack dogs with their human handlers walking behind pushed along the main thoroughfare.
A prickling sensation crawled along my neck as the locket warmed my skin. I looked toward the carpentry yard. The young man with the adze had stopped work in order to turn half around. Was the cursed man staring at me? What had I ever done to him to attract his rude notice?
He wore loose trousers belted at his hips with rope and above that, as I had already had cause to remark, nothing but gorgeous muscled skin the color of the raw umber worked in painters’ studios, a deep, rich, warm, luxuriously dark brown. He set down the adze and, bracing a hand on the fence, leaped over it. Then he strode toward me as if certain I was about to bolt and he must catch me before I did so.
Several carpenters halted their work. One whistled, provoking laughter.
Another yelled, “Don’ let this one run away, Vai. Not like that one yee lost…”
I blinked, for the man approaching me so determinedly looked exactly as Andevai Diarisso Haranwy would look if he were half dressed and his chest and back sheeny with sweat from hard physical labor.
Blessed Tanit, but it was hot in this country!
He stopped at arm’s length.
“Catherine,” he said, the word fading as if he hadn’t the strength to get it all out.
I couldn’t tell if he wanted to embrace me or berate me. Heat burning up my cheeks, I knew what he was going to say: “Who was that man and why was he kissing you when you are my wife? ”
He said, “Did Duvai find you?”
After several years of effort that passed in perhaps five sluggish breaths, I sewed together the rudiments of speech out of the remnants of my confounded mind.
“Duvai?”
“After I lost you in that well, I meant to follow you into the spirit world myself at Imbolc. But I was unavoidably detained, and then—well—then it wasn’t possible. So I asked my brother Duvai to hunt for you. I must imagine you recall him well enough, since he was the person who guided you out of my village in order to keep you away from me.”
Only Andevai could have managed that hint of peevishness, as if he, rather than I, had been the one inconvenienced by the mansa’s command to kill me!
“I recall him with a great deal of gratitude, if you must know.”
“I do not doubt it,” he said quellingly.
“He did not find me.” I fished out the locket. “But your grandmother did.”
He recoiled, taking a step back. A trio of passing trolls skirted him without breaking stride, as if accustomed to crowded streets where stray men lurched blindly into their path. A man not quite in control of a dozen leashed, unpleasantly large, and clearly short-tempered snapping lizards yelled at us to get out of the way.
Vai grabbed my wrist. “This isn’t the place to have this conversation.”
He strode back toward the carpentry yard, me trotting alongside, my mind whirling and my stride kicking awkwardly against the damp pagne. We went in by an unlatched gate. Wood shavings warmed by the sun padded my footsteps. Every man in the yard had ceased working in order to enjoy the spectacle. If one man among the twenty or so was not grinning or chuckling, I did not see him.
“Ja, maku! That a fine catch yee hauled in!”
“That the gal yee lost?”
“Yes,” said Vai in a clipped tone which likely meant he was strangling an intense emotion.
An ominous silence dropped over the men.
He tugged me to a thatched-roofed shelter with no walls where a woman, seated in its shade, was measuring a shaved plank with calipers. She had silver-streaked straight black hair and the broad features I was beginning to recognize as Taino.
“Boss,” he said, halting beside her table, “I need the rest of the day off. I’ll make it up.”
She finished her measurements and noted down the figures in an accounts book before she glanced up. She looked me up and down. “We’s not running a stud service, Vai. Nor a sly tavern.”
Some of the men had come up to the shelter’s edge.
“Never say yee mean it, maku,” said one of the younger ones. He had scarred cheeks and a keen gaze. “She really that one yee lost?”
“Yes.”
Soft whistles and murmurs greeted this curt pronouncement.
The boss measured me rather as she had just been measuring the plank. With no shift of expression, she nodded. “That change matters, then. I shall expect yee tomorrow, the usual.”
“My thanks.”
“I shall bring yee tools when I come for the areito,” said the young man with the scars.
“My thanks, Kofi,” said Vai in the absentminded tone of a man whose thoughts have already galloped over the next hill. He led me to another shelter, where he let go of me to grab a singlet out of several draped over a sawhorse. After tugging it on, he unhooked a leather bottle from a crossbeam.
“Drink,” he said, unstoppering it. “You look sun-reddened.”
“What is it?” I asked suspiciously.
“Guava juice sweetened with pineapple and lime. You need to drink or you’ll get sun sick.”
It was juice, sweet and pure, and after I had gulped down so much that I burped, he slung the bottle over his shoulder. The carpenters had moved off and the boss had gone back to her measuring. After a hesitation, he clasped my hand in the way of innocent children, palm to palm, and examined me, neither smiling nor frowning.
“Will you come with me, Catherine? Or would you rather not?”
“What choice do I have?” I demanded.
His lips thinned as he pressed them tight as if to hold back words he didn’t want to say. Then he spoke. “Why, the choice I just gave you. Which I meant. Is there something I need to know?”
I flushed, utterly embarrassed. “What do you think you might need to know?”
He looked skyward, released a breath, and addressed me without looking at me. “I must wonder if your…affections are engaged.”
“My affections are not engaged. I do not love any man, if that is what you mean.”
“Of course it’s what I mean! What am I to think, having seen what I saw?”
“Did it not occur to you that he’s the one who abandoned me? In a strange city? Oh, la, darling! I have secret business of my own and I’ll return to fetch you when I get around to it?”
He looked at the ground, his expression flashing through a series of emotions too complex to unravel. Hard to imagine the man who had worn perfectly polished boots and expensive, tailored dash jackets standing in worn trousers and dusty bare feet in a carpentry yard! “I’m sorry to hear you were abandoned.”
“You don’t sound sorry. You sound pleased.”
“Very well, Catherine.” His gaze flashed up to sear me. “I’m not sorry. And I am pleased.” He brushed the scabbed-over wound above my right eye, his touch cau
tious but his tone trembling as on the brink of a cliff. “Unless he’s hurt you. In that case, I’ll kill him for you, if you like.”
“I don’t find that amusing.”
Thank Tanit, he looked down again, for I could not have borne the intensity of those eyes for one more heart-stopping breath.
I went on. “It would be better just to let it go.”
“How like a woman to say so!” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said too quickly. When he looked up, he had veiled that boiling glare behind a screen of prickly disdain. “My offer still stands. Come with me, if you wish. I ask nothing of you, except that you allow me to offer you shelter. Or go your own way, if that is what you prefer.”
“I’ll come with you.” I didn’t want to let go of a hand that was like a lifeline in a storm-tossed sea.
He closed his eyes briefly, making no reply. Nor did he let go of my hand.
We walked inland. Once away from the carpentry yard we were just another young couple, although I am sure I looked as if I had just been fished out of the sea, so bedraggled was I. The neighborhood was laid out in a grid plan, two-story buildings behind gates and walls, mostly workshops and residential compounds. In the streets, children played a game by hitting a ball with their knees and elbows and calves, and it was quite astonishing how they kept it from touching the ground without ever catching it in their hands. Women dyed cloth in vats and hung the cloth from lines to dry. One pretty woman looked up, began to smile as if to call out a greeting to Vai, then saw me. As her eyes widened, she nudged a companion, and they whispered as they watched us go.
We walked up a quiet boulevard where men were sewing companionably under cloth awnings. The streets were paved with smooth-fitting stone swept clean of debris, and posted with gas lamps for the coming of evening. Past every gate opened a courtyard where more people, of all ages, lounged under shaded shelters or busied themselves at some manner of work. Women carried baskets of vegetables and fruit on their heads. More than one smiled at Vai with a friendly—or over-friendly—greeting, only to notice me with surprise or disbelief. He was polite to everyone, but he plowed forward without stopping.
